Hi, my name is Roman Samakosky, from Russia, and I would like to tell you about the process of creating the image, "An Old Lamp". Hopefully you will find something useful for yourself from this Making Of! (Fig.01).

Fig. 01

Concept

The idea for this image came about after I saw a similar lamp in a magazine. I seldom do replicas as I prefer to create something new, something unique, which is why I only took the idea from the lamp which I had seen, and then began searching for my own various antique lamp references on the Internet, examining their shapes and patterns in order to get an overall image of the antique lamp. After that I started on the modelling.

Modelling

I chose editable poly as the modelling method because it quite successfully deals with complicated tasks, such as modelling mechanical junctions, as well as organic shapes. A sophisticated shape and the minor details of the lamp were of the main tasks to perform for this piece, so I spent much time on this stage of modelling to achieve the necessary detail. On the whole, it took me a month to complete the modelling for the entire scene.

I don't think it really makes sense here for me to describe the modelling process of each object in the given article, so I will show you the process of creating one of the patterns on my lamp, instead. Note: I used the same technique on this as on all other objects.

First of all, using the surface, I drew the type of shape that I needed. This is very easy to do: at the "Edge" level I dragged the edges (sides) by holding the Shift button whilst controlling the shape of the required object at the "Vertex" level (Fig.02). After achieving the required shape I added thickness with the help of the "Shell" modifier. I then converted it to Editable Poly and worked on the mesh to add small details. Finally, I used the "Turbo Smooth" modifier (Fig.03).

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

I'd like to tell you now a little about the modelling of the rams heads, in particular, on the lamp stand detail. Organic modelling is always a complicated task, so I didn't find this part too easy to do. I was modelling out of the surface, constantly comparing the model with real images to achieve better resemblance. However, I had to delete 2 models of heads until I was satisfied with the third one. In the end, I was pleased with the result, and thus, using an Editable Poly toolset, I created this geometry (Fig.04).

Fig. 04

Originally, I didn't plan to put the lamp in any kind of scene; I was thinking of creating something like this (Fig .05). But while working on the image, I came to realise that the lamp needed a scene, and so, once again, I started browsing the Internet for pictures of various antiques, such as old designs of cameras, oil lamps, and so on. I also used editable poly, and sometimes also splines, to model the scene for my lamp to be placed into (Fig.06 and 07). As a result, after the modelling stage I got the following geometry (Fig.08).